The Python Software Foundation acts as a fiscal sponsor for a much smaller set of orgs (20 listed on https://www.python.org/psf/fiscal-sponsorees/) and it keeps our accounting team pretty busy just looking after those. Hack Club must have this down to a very fine art.
Ouch, that is enormous. They forgot to handle images properly, so they’re serving ginormous images in inefficient formats instead of scaled thumbnails in efficient formats—just the first page transfers more than 40MB, and the second page is just as bad, and the third significantly worse. You get things like 11827×13107 “17230 Aluminium Falcons” logo being rendered at 64px high. (I’m surprised that one’s under 9MB.) Across pages 1–3, it’s averaging 1MB per item, which if it continues all the way to page 53 would exceed 2.5GB. Done properly, I’d expect most to be under 10KB, with a few up as high as 50KB, staying well under 1MB per page, and comfortably under 50MB for all 53 pages. It’d load faster and be cheaper to serve too.
(I know this isn’t what you meant, but it loaded so slowly that I looked, and that’s easily big enough to cause problems for some users.)
It's incredible! HCB is a member run project where teens can also make their own non profits! Even Hack Clubs finances are made public at https://hcb.hackclub.com/hq/
Really nice to see a solidly valuable project develop a sustainable foundation instead of turning into yet another VC-backed devtools startup that will inevitably die in a few years.
There are hundreds of thousands of software engineers who, given FU amounts of money, would absolutely keep writing software and do it only for the love of it. The companies that hire us usually make us sign promises that we won't work on side projects. Even if there are legal workarounds to that, it's not quite so simple.
Even still, whatever high salaries they do give us just flow right back into the neighborhoods through insane property values and other cost-of-living expenses that negate any gains. So, it’s always just the few of us who can win that lottery and truly break out of the cycle.
This seems really nice. Wasn't aware of hack club but that just looks like a wonderful construction and organization.
In a world of VC backed open source projects with big profit motivations, it's refreshing to see things like this. Definitely going to give ghostty another try!
I'm making an effort to support Open Source projects that I use everyday; much in the way I support creators on YouTube via Patreon with small monthly commitments, so it's a welcome opportunity that GhosTTY has made that easy to accomplish.
The only thing I am missing now from Ghostty is being able to open it in any open Finder folder with a keyboard shortcut(like standard Ubuntu terminal). Ghostty already provides Finder-specific GUI shortcut but you need to use a mouse. Otherwise, stellar work(especially the ease of configuring it) and congrats to everyone involved!
I never realize Ghostty is a project by Mitchell Hashimoto. I am very happy with tmux and never seriously looked at it , now I really curious what is it about and how it is different than say tmux ?
I really love Ghostty. Thanks to it, my comeback to (n)vim has been quite smooth. Keybindings with the CMD key works right away without having to send any escape sequence or similar. It just works™
gnome-terminal is GTK 3 last I checked, and foot uses Wayland primitives. If you want a native terminal feel, Ghostty would be a great terminal. On Linux, my backup terminal is Ptyxis, authored by Christian Hergert. I recommend Ptyxis over gnome-terminal or gnome-console.
- It looks good. Or more correctly, it is easy to make it look good. If one spends a lot of time in the Terminal emulator, it looking good has some positives.
- It uses plain text configuration that is easy to modify and version control.
Edit:
- At least on Linux, foot's support for windows and tabs is limited to starting an entirely new process.
My biggest reason for using it over gnome terminal is osc52 support https://ali.anari.io/posts/osc52/ which lets you copy paste using a escape sequence. Meaning you can copy paste when ssh'ed into another machine. Gnome terminal doesn't support this currently and there is a discussion on whether they will because of security concerns https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/issues/2495
It’s just faster when you accidentally dump large amount of text or binary onto the Terminal. You can measure this by running `time cat` on a multi-gigabyte file and observing the wall clock time.
So the same Hack Club from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45913663 is now managing donations. Yeah, I don't think I'm gonna be donating to Ghostty any time soon. Just seems like a deeply unserious organization all around.
they are great, and I feel your concern is misplaced.
when you support literally thousands of teenagers over the internet (the delightfully overconfident, inexperienced, famous-for-trolling humans that they are) and literally only a handful have beef with you, you are running a really solid ship
This is great work and good news, however if you want to guarantee a long-term public benefit, use copyleft without a CLA! A more well-funded company can fork this and make the new work proprietary, meaning you did all that initial development work for them for free.
Apple and Microsoft are the two most likely parties to do so here. This isn't a theoretical risk.
Does anyone have good examples of this actually happening for end user software (like Ghostty is) and where in the long term proprietary fork won? Most of the recent variations of this that come to my mind are related to cloud infrastructure. Stuff where you have serious business customers.
And in some of those cases GPL wasn't enough to prevent it. Niche end user utilities, where original is available for free have little room for monetization. And in many cases existing users are already choosing the open source option despite the existence of commercial solutions, or where it's too niche for commercial solutions to exist.
Only thing that comes to my mind is VScode with all the AI craze. But that doesn't quite fit the pattern neither is the Microsoft underdog, nor it's clear that any of AI based editors derived from VScode will survive by themselves long term.
There are also occasional grifters trying to sell open source software with little long term impact.
Kudos to Mitchell for doing it. Unfortunately the "rug pull" issue has been severely crippled by OpenAI's about face turn on their non profit status, but knowing Mitchell, he's not about the money, power, status, etc so the project is in good hands and you can expect this to stay free.
> Unfortunately the "rug pull" issue has been severely crippled by OpenAI's about face turn on their non profit status,
The situations aren't comparable.
OpenAI was a non-profit foundation that held a controlling share in a for-profit organisation. It's model is based around controlling access to their data (which was never open), and controlling access to their models (which are also not open).
If Ghostty does sets up a for-profit org with the NFP as the majority holder then we can have the conversation, but even at that fork + move on (like OpenTofu, Valkey, CentOS, MariaDB, Jenkins) is an option.
I'm really excited about Ghostty (and Zig mostly because of my exposure via ghostty). Until ghostty I hadn't really considered that a terminal would be a catalyst for innovation and even startups. But, libghostty is REALLY fascinating. And, all the good AI coding tools, IMHO, operate inside a terminal, and my head is spinning with ideas about hammering on the container for these new CLIs.
(UWash CompSci strikes again, not that I'm biased)
Inspired by this I just posted a resonably niche feature request to the Ghostty discussion forum (copy and paste to support text/rtf)... and found out within half an hour that the equivalent of what I was asking for was already available on their main branch: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/9798
Mitchell Hashimoto is a real programmer in the old vein. It's lovely to see him succeed. Ghostty is fantastic to use.
There was a devtools blackhole era once where if you got in that business you were just giving things away and never got to reap the rewards. Then there was this era of founders who figured out how to make it sticky and capture value in a Pareto-optimal way.
Charles Schwab has written (my memory) that putting one's name on the business stakes its reputation there, and such a business is theoretically more trustworthy.
Non-profits allow projects to grow beyond hobbies. Covering costs (whether that's the expense of hosting / running the project or hiring talented people to work on it) is going to be a better incentive to keep the projects alive in the long term, meaning that people can rely on them instead of being wary that the project might become abandonware in a year.
> I believe infrastructure of this kind should be stewarded by a mission-driven, non-commercial entity that prioritizes public benefit over private profit.
One of my pet peeves is people trotting out “I believe” statements. (Usually) I care much more about the evidence that backs the belief than the belief.
Putting aside my cantankerousness, I am glad Michael believes in setting up good incentives for the organization that will manage Ghostty. (But being glad right now doesn’t count for much.)
At a deeper level, my more
precise complaint is people broadcasting “I believe” statements as if doing so should persuade us. It should not. “I believe” statements may often be personal and genuine, but they are so easily abused that perhaps they should be enumerated among the dark patterns of rhetoric.
(There are some ridiculous quote from the first episode of Silicon Valley by Mike Judge that pokes fun at the zealotry behind belief, but I can’t quote it off the top of my head.)
In the case of software projects with broad benefits that want continuity over a long period of time, I want to agree that the not-for-profit structure is a good choice and often than the alternatives. But I don’t know that this has been carefully studied.
My hunch would be there are stronger causal predictors such as governance mechanisms. Choosing an organization form is just step one. Smart governance, and long-term execution can only be shown with time.
Individuals with unaligned incentives will challenge any organization’s set of rules. In the same way that our immune system has to evolve over time to win, organizational rules at all levels have to evolve.
Also, I do think there’s a lot of opportunity for smarter legal structures after the machinations pulled by OpenAI.
It seems likely that some people have perceived what I wrote above as some kind of criticism of Ghostty or that it is now funded by a non-profit. That would be a misunderstanding [1].
Personally -- for context, not to be confused with an argument-from-authority -- I've worked in the not-for-profit sector (3+ orgs) as well as studying how to make it work better. There are people with immensely more knowledge than I, and I have learned from them, and I respect the lessons they try to convey.
In case it puts people at ease, yes, I want Ghostty to succeed. I tend to agree that a not-for-profit home is likely be a good choice, especially relative to an alternative where it might be mostly reliant on one person and/or beholden to corporate interests.
So what I am saying, at core? More or less: this is probably a good start but only a start. I am suggesting more awareness of:
1. There is a psychological tendency for people to _believe_ others who express more confidence. Being aware of this helps us notice it and prefer evidence over statements of belief.
2. What does evidence show about making OSS project succeed? Giving it a not-for-profit home seems like a good start, but how important is this relative to other choices? What does the evidence show?
To mention one place to start, here is a open-access article from the ACM that I skimmed: "Open Source Software Sustainability: Combining Institutional Analysis and Socio-Technical Networks" [2] However, I didn't find it particularly useful in answering my #2 question above. Also the paper seemed mostly to promote a method of analysis but didn't drive towards actionable nor causal recommendations.
[1]: Maybe the misunderstanding comes from one or more of the following?
(a) halo effect (e.g. "Michael is a good guy, your words imply an indirect criticism of him");
(b) tribalism (e.g. "you are either with us or against us");
(c) timing-oriented (e.g. "this is not the time to be critical; this is a time to be jolly.");
(d) past success implies future results (e.g. "Hack Club has done well so far, trust them");
(e) tone-policing (e.g. "You seem grumpy, dude");
(f) feeling lectured-at (e.g. "You seem to act like you know things we don't.")
All of these possibilities would involve a some degree of presumption about what is appropriate and some level of disengagement with the substance of what I'm writing. Remember, we have a big tent here with room for many different points of view.
> A non-profit structure provides enforceable assurances: the mission cannot be quietly changed, funds cannot be diverted to private benefit, and the project cannot be sold off or repurposed for commercial gain.
What does he mean, isn't this what OpenAI just did, I'm confused guys
"A non-profit structure provides enforceable assurances: the mission cannot be quietly changed, funds cannot be diverted to private benefit, and the project cannot be sold off or repurposed for commercial gain. The structure legally binds Ghostty to the public-benefit purpose it was created to serve."
I mean, after the OpenAI debacle, surely this type of assurance doesn't hold much weight anymore? (Though Ghostty is ofc very unlikely to pull shenanigans)
76 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 72.9 ms ] threadThe Python Software Foundation acts as a fiscal sponsor for a much smaller set of orgs (20 listed on https://www.python.org/psf/fiscal-sponsorees/) and it keeps our accounting team pretty busy just looking after those. Hack Club must have this down to a very fine art.
I wrote a bit more about PSF fiscal sponsorship here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/18/board-of-the-python-so...
It might have improved since then?
Ouch, that is enormous. They forgot to handle images properly, so they’re serving ginormous images in inefficient formats instead of scaled thumbnails in efficient formats—just the first page transfers more than 40MB, and the second page is just as bad, and the third significantly worse. You get things like 11827×13107 “17230 Aluminium Falcons” logo being rendered at 64px high. (I’m surprised that one’s under 9MB.) Across pages 1–3, it’s averaging 1MB per item, which if it continues all the way to page 53 would exceed 2.5GB. Done properly, I’d expect most to be under 10KB, with a few up as high as 50KB, staying well under 1MB per page, and comfortably under 50MB for all 53 pages. It’d load faster and be cheaper to serve too.
(I know this isn’t what you meant, but it loaded so slowly that I looked, and that’s easily big enough to cause problems for some users.)
Even still, whatever high salaries they do give us just flow right back into the neighborhoods through insane property values and other cost-of-living expenses that negate any gains. So, it’s always just the few of us who can win that lottery and truly break out of the cycle.
In a world of VC backed open source projects with big profit motivations, it's refreshing to see things like this. Definitely going to give ghostty another try!
“What the monetization strategy of Ghostty?”
“My monetization strategy is that my bank account has 10 digits in it…” lol, epic.
Wow.
> cat ~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts/Ghostty
#!/usr/bin/env bash
ghostty --working-directory=$(pwd)
> cat ~/.config/nautilus/scripts-accels
<Ctrl><Shift>F4 Ghostty
Lowers the risk of a rug pull or the project becoming suddenly abandoned.
Reminds me of Signal.
Newer terminal apps like WezTerm have a multiplexer built-in.
But I'm using KDE anywa, and I don't care about kitty graphic protocol, I have better suited apps to watch images.
- It uses plain text configuration that is easy to modify and version control.
Edit: - At least on Linux, foot's support for windows and tabs is limited to starting an entirely new process.
when you support literally thousands of teenagers over the internet (the delightfully overconfident, inexperienced, famous-for-trolling humans that they are) and literally only a handful have beef with you, you are running a really solid ship
Apple and Microsoft are the two most likely parties to do so here. This isn't a theoretical risk.
And in some of those cases GPL wasn't enough to prevent it. Niche end user utilities, where original is available for free have little room for monetization. And in many cases existing users are already choosing the open source option despite the existence of commercial solutions, or where it's too niche for commercial solutions to exist.
Only thing that comes to my mind is VScode with all the AI craze. But that doesn't quite fit the pattern neither is the Microsoft underdog, nor it's clear that any of AI based editors derived from VScode will survive by themselves long term.
There are also occasional grifters trying to sell open source software with little long term impact.
The situations aren't comparable.
OpenAI was a non-profit foundation that held a controlling share in a for-profit organisation. It's model is based around controlling access to their data (which was never open), and controlling access to their models (which are also not open).
If Ghostty does sets up a for-profit org with the NFP as the majority holder then we can have the conversation, but even at that fork + move on (like OpenTofu, Valkey, CentOS, MariaDB, Jenkins) is an option.
(UWash CompSci strikes again, not that I'm biased)
There was a devtools blackhole era once where if you got in that business you were just giving things away and never got to reap the rewards. Then there was this era of founders who figured out how to make it sticky and capture value in a Pareto-optimal way.
Love to see it.
Also, didn't said company piss people off in some way that led to Open Tofu being created?
Or has this always been a thing. But it feels like a common—and celebrated—outcome for a lot of projects.
One of my pet peeves is people trotting out “I believe” statements. (Usually) I care much more about the evidence that backs the belief than the belief.
Putting aside my cantankerousness, I am glad Michael believes in setting up good incentives for the organization that will manage Ghostty. (But being glad right now doesn’t count for much.)
At a deeper level, my more precise complaint is people broadcasting “I believe” statements as if doing so should persuade us. It should not. “I believe” statements may often be personal and genuine, but they are so easily abused that perhaps they should be enumerated among the dark patterns of rhetoric.
(There are some ridiculous quote from the first episode of Silicon Valley by Mike Judge that pokes fun at the zealotry behind belief, but I can’t quote it off the top of my head.)
In the case of software projects with broad benefits that want continuity over a long period of time, I want to agree that the not-for-profit structure is a good choice and often than the alternatives. But I don’t know that this has been carefully studied.
My hunch would be there are stronger causal predictors such as governance mechanisms. Choosing an organization form is just step one. Smart governance, and long-term execution can only be shown with time.
Individuals with unaligned incentives will challenge any organization’s set of rules. In the same way that our immune system has to evolve over time to win, organizational rules at all levels have to evolve.
Also, I do think there’s a lot of opportunity for smarter legal structures after the machinations pulled by OpenAI.
Personally -- for context, not to be confused with an argument-from-authority -- I've worked in the not-for-profit sector (3+ orgs) as well as studying how to make it work better. There are people with immensely more knowledge than I, and I have learned from them, and I respect the lessons they try to convey.
In case it puts people at ease, yes, I want Ghostty to succeed. I tend to agree that a not-for-profit home is likely be a good choice, especially relative to an alternative where it might be mostly reliant on one person and/or beholden to corporate interests.
So what I am saying, at core? More or less: this is probably a good start but only a start. I am suggesting more awareness of:
1. There is a psychological tendency for people to _believe_ others who express more confidence. Being aware of this helps us notice it and prefer evidence over statements of belief.
2. What does evidence show about making OSS project succeed? Giving it a not-for-profit home seems like a good start, but how important is this relative to other choices? What does the evidence show?
To mention one place to start, here is a open-access article from the ACM that I skimmed: "Open Source Software Sustainability: Combining Institutional Analysis and Socio-Technical Networks" [2] However, I didn't find it particularly useful in answering my #2 question above. Also the paper seemed mostly to promote a method of analysis but didn't drive towards actionable nor causal recommendations.
[1]: Maybe the misunderstanding comes from one or more of the following?
(a) halo effect (e.g. "Michael is a good guy, your words imply an indirect criticism of him");
(b) tribalism (e.g. "you are either with us or against us");
(c) timing-oriented (e.g. "this is not the time to be critical; this is a time to be jolly.");
(d) past success implies future results (e.g. "Hack Club has done well so far, trust them");
(e) tone-policing (e.g. "You seem grumpy, dude");
(f) feeling lectured-at (e.g. "You seem to act like you know things we don't.")
All of these possibilities would involve a some degree of presumption about what is appropriate and some level of disengagement with the substance of what I'm writing. Remember, we have a big tent here with room for many different points of view.
[2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3555129
What does he mean, isn't this what OpenAI just did, I'm confused guys
I mean, after the OpenAI debacle, surely this type of assurance doesn't hold much weight anymore? (Though Ghostty is ofc very unlikely to pull shenanigans)